Sunday, June 09, 2013

Despite the title I gave this picture when I saved it, it's not Jerusalem. It's an Israeli camera, but it's Surat, India. And while many Israelis may be watching with some bemusement as Americans go ballistic over reports that they're being spied on, we really have nothing about which to gloat.

PJ Media is now reporting that some 50 US companies have admitted to cooperating with the National Security Agency.

Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access
real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies,
ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two
government officials familiar with the arrangements said.

Several of the companies have provided records continuously since
2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these
officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating
companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about
the NSA’s domestic collection policies. The officials, contacted
independently, repeatedly said that “domestic collection” does not mean
that the target is based in the U.S. or is a U.S. citizen; rather, it
refers only to the origin of the data.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that U.S. credit card
companies had also provided customer information. The officials would
not disclose the names of the companies because, they said, doing so
would provide U.S. enemies with a list of companies to avoid. They
declined to confirm the list of participants in an internet monitoring
program revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian, but both
confirmed that the program existed.

“The idea is to create a mosaic. We get a tip. We vet it. Then we mine the data for intelligence,” one of the officials said.

What is especially troubling is that both companies have had
extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s
intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of
spying on the U.S.

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining
software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international
eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level
employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The
employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a
very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to
us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the
Israelis.”

Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.
“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the
chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign
relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign
countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that
way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of
the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them
officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to
communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said.
“For access.”

But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the
technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the
world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as
extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic
and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later,
four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think
there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”

Narus was formed in
Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming
from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and
former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta
specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli
defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the
chief technology officer.

A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to
capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.”
The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled
monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and
government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes
through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can
reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web
pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet
Protocol] calls.”

Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including
Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800
employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel,
primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature,
lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type
of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query
and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast
numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and
communications.”

In a rare and candid admission to Forbes,
Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret
Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on
Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that
dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE,
Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech
companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said
Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product,
the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”

According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the
group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed
are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious
estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez
in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech
companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred
to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between
serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech
companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around
the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies
and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”

And whether or not the two companies that are
being cited did indeed work with the US government to gather
information, Israel would have been a perfect “sandbox” (virtual
practice zone) for the companies to perfect their technology
surveillance, according to attorney Jonathan Klinger.
That is because the laws regarding privacy
on the Internet and electronic communications in Israel are much more
“liberal” — for the security agencies, that is – than they are in many
other democracies, notably the US. Indeed, Israelis can only envy the
uproar among Americans over the PRISM program, says Klinger, an internet
privacy expert.

Compared to the extremely wide powers of Israeli police
and security organizations over electronic data, “the powers of the
American agencies are a joke.”

...

According to the reports, the US government’s
PRISM data-gathering program (which, according to James Clapper, US
Director of National Intelligence, is not aimed at Americans, but
against foreigners, and only to prevent terror attacks) is facilitated
by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is specifically
aimed at gathering intelligence on enemy agents or terrorists who are
not US citizens. The government must show probable cause of security
concerns to the organizations from which it is requesting the
information.

That is apparently not the case in Israel, Klinger wrote in a blog post,
“giving my two cents on Prism. Over the past decade, Israel has enacted
a number of surveillance laws that allow unrestrained use of personal
information of citizens for routine investigations, not only for the
prevention of terrorism.

Among those laws is one ratified by the
Knesset in 2007 allowing police and other agencies to request – and get –
information about individuals under investigation, even without the
requirement to get a warrant from a judge. Companies are required to
supply information on individuals who may be connected — even
circumstantially — to a crime. For example, if police suspect that a
murder took place at a certain time and a specific location, they can
request location data on customers from cellphone service providers, in
order to identify those who were in the area when the crime was
committed, said Klinger.

In 2009, police filed 9,000 requests for
information from cellphone and Internet companies, including 2,000 for
offenses relating to “public order” — offenses which, Klinger said,
often had political overtones, aimed at leaders of protest groups and
movements.

In 2008, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed a lawsuit
against police and other security organizations, as well as against
communications companies like Bezeq, cellphone service providers Cellcom
and Pelephone, Internet service providers Netvision and Hot, and many
others, claiming that police and security agencies, in collusion with
the communications companies, had gone way beyond their authorities in
demanding information about customers.

The courts dismissed the case.
Apparently emboldened, said Klinger, the government asked the Knesset to
expand the number of agencies that could request data, to include tax
authorities, the Agriculture and Environment Ministries, and even the
Parks and Nature Authority.

As things stand today, all those agencies, and
more, can request information from communications companies without
having to present a warrant. Companies that refuse to comply may be
hauled into court to justify why they refused. In such cases, said
Klinger, the courts invariably rule for the government.

1 Comments:

Remember when Googleman Schmidt and who... some Federation people and some rapper went over to Israel before the last election and I was (as always and forever!) squawking about Green $lu$h and how it is a ongoing/endless campaign tactic for the Progressive Democrat Dictators? And here we see that the alt.enegy, anti-carbon Green $lu$h is a "tactic" for the Marcuse Marxist Dictators... That's it and if Israel is helping with Big Brother $lu$h, also... what can I say. You guys need to get ahold of your country. And if so many of you are ready to try to co-run a coup on the U.S. constitution, then let us know so we can have an accurate view of what's going on. And if you are wanting the U.S. to keep the constitution so that the U.S. won't be arming up your Muslim Brotherhood Executioners, then you're going to have to take a human risk and YELL out against the DICTATORS.

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About Me

I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-three years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 10 to 31 years and seven grandchildren. Three of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com